OISE Graduate Student Research Conference 2024
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Canada
March 22-23, 2024
The OISE Graduate Studies Research Conference is an annual conference open to all OISE students and recent OISE alumni. This year, the theme for the conference was “Despite and Because of Difference”: Cultivating Critical Conversations for the Future of Education, which seeks to foster productive dialogues and create space for knowledge exchanges and the development of potential political solidarities among participants. Proposals were invited that fall under five different themes:
Difference and Belonging
Resistance and Agency
Cross-community Conversations
Transformative Theory and Practice
Future Educational Imaginaries
The conference booklet can be found here:
I presented on a panel called "Situated Interventions: Diverse Approaches to Community Sustainability", which featured speakers on sustainability as it relates to traditional Chinese culture and higher education. My own paper was called "Redefining Consumption and Sustainable Planning: Freetown and the City of Darkness Through a Green Lens", which reimagines the work of Derek Wall on the commons as it is applied to Green republicanism and active citizenship.
The purpose of this paper was to unpack the concept of Green republicanism for a better understanding of how citizenship is a relationship of rights and responsibilities between the individual, the community and the common "good" or asset. For Green republicans, this asset is the environment. It is based on a tradition of self-governance, public discourse and education, and the equitable sharing of these rights and responsibilities is what creates the sense of community. Political action is implied as an eventuality through this public discourse and learning regarding environmental stewardship, because citizens feel appropriate steps have not been taken by the government to ensure environmental sustainability.
In order to understand this concept of Green commons theory, which is a reconceptualization of Ostrom's commons theory according to Derek Wall combined with Green republicanism, I use two very different case studies and interpretation of the commons: Kowloon Walled City and Freetown Christiania. One was a Chinese enclave within the British colony of Hong Kong said to be “filthy” and “lawless”, while the other was considered to be an anarchist "social experiment" by the Danish government. I engage with features traditionally linked to commons, such as enclosures, radical social movements, and usufruct rights, to arrive at a definition of Green commons theory and how it situates between Wall's commons and Green ideology.
In the end, the concept of green commons theory relies heavily on the way in which the common pool resources are collectively managed. Green republicanism speaks to self-governance and a community where everyone is treated as equitably as possible through social rather than economic standards. But ultimately, the question that needs to be answered may be whether the citizens exercise their rights and responsibilities towards the common good, which is the commons.